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This article reminds me of two recent observations by Paul Krugman about the internet: "So, here’s labor productivity growth over the 25 years following each d

This article reminds me of two recent observations by Paul Krugman about the internet: "So, here’s labor productivity growth over the 25 years following each date on the horizontal axis [...] See the great productivity boom that followed the rise of the internet? Neither do I. [...] Maybe the key point is that nobody is arguing that the internet has been useless; surely, it has contributed to economic growth. The argument instead is that its benefits weren’t exceptionally large compared with those of earlier, less glamorous technologies."¹ "On the second, history suggests that large economic effects from A.I. will take longer to materialize than many people currently seem to expect [...] And even while it lasted, productivity growth during the I.T. boom was no higher than it was during the generation-long boom after World War II, which was notable in the fact that it didn’t seem to be driven by any radically new technology [...] That’s not to say that artificial intelligence won’t have huge economic impacts. But history suggests that they won’t come quickly. ChatGPT and whatever follows are probably an economic story for the 2030s, not for the next few years."² ¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... ² https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/ai-chatgpt-jobs-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/ai-chatgpt-jobs-e...

abathologist 1y ago
My theory is that the digital revolution has mostly cancelled out potential productivity gains with its introduction of productivity sinks: the technology has tended to encourage less rigorous thinking, more distraction, more complexity; and even if you can do task T X times faster, most people as spending X * Y more time being distracted, overwhelmed, or just reflective button pushers. The ways AI is being used now will make this a lot worse on every front.

abathologist 1y ago

My theory is that the digital revolution has mostly cancelled out potential productivity gains with its introduction of productivity sinks: the technology has tended to encourage less rigorous thinking, more distraction, more complexity; and even if you can do task T X times faster, most people as spending X * Y more time being distracted, overwhelmed, or just reflective button pushers. The ways AI is being used now will make this a lot worse on every front.